Nick Moffitt on Tue, 19 Jun 2001 00:38:02 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Moffitt Lameness Index |
One of the things that has impressed me with nettime-l is how well it rates on the Moffitt Lameness Index. Long ago, I realized that all of the whiney posts on Linux User Group mailing lists were coming from users of legacy Microsoft Windows mailers. I simply set up a filter to move all of the messages they sent to the lists into a separate mailbox, and did the same thing for my personal mail. What I noticed, in addition to the S/N ratio on the lists seeming to climb, was that I was now receiving virtually no spam in my personal inbox. So I refined the filters, added certain hostnames (such as aol.com and yahoo.com), and certain other icky headers (such as Content-type: text/html and any sort of Priority header). The result, when combined with some rules about when a message is actually to me, is a surprisingly effective filter. Of course, being a free software zealot, I tend not to exchange e-mails with users of legacy proprietary operating systems much. When I do, they tend to be using some proprietary Unix, and have compiled a free mailer (such as mutt) for it anyway. I do not have any sorting going on for nettime-l, but instead color messages according to their Moffitt value (red for weenie, white for indifferent, cyan for people I enjoy reading, and green for me). Nettime-l performs surprisingly well -- better than any other list I am on (save for the crackmonkey.org list, which performs these filters as a moderation technique). In a sample of 1556 messages running from Oct 25 to the present day, nettime-l had a grand total of 68 that ranked as Weenie on the Moffitt Index, providing a Moffitt Lameness Value of 4.4%! This translates to a Moffitt S/N ratio of roughly 22 to one. Congratulations! -- You are not entitled to your opinions. 01234567 <- The amazing* indent-o-meter! ^ (*: Indent-o-meter may not actually amaze.) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]